The Key to Being A Real Man

The hashtag #metoo trended across social media this past week in an attempt to make men understand how disgusting and rampant their sexual abuse of women is. This sparked an online conversation between a friend of mine and a male associate that went like this:

“Do you know how to hold these?”

Every female reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about. Someone who shall remain nameless IM’d me yesterday, asking what is “me too”. I explained to him that women were posting that to their FB pages if they had been sexually harassed or assaulted. He was skeptical that many women had “something like that” happen to them.

I asked: When you are walking around town by yourself, how do you hold your keys?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: Not a trick question. When you are walking around by yourself, how do you hold your keys?
Him: They are usually in my pocket.
Me: The next five women you see, ask them that question. They will know exactly what I’m talking about.

[I clarified that he needed to ask the next five women * he actually knows *, not just random women. Didn’t want him to creep anyone out. ]

Me: After they show you how to properly hold your keys, ask if they have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted.
Him: I’m NOT asking anyone that!
Me: Why not?
Him: Seems awfully personal.
Me: How do you expect to learn anything if you are not willing to have an uncomfortable conversation or two? Explain that you are trying to educate yourself on what women face in their lives. Explain that you don’t need details, you are just trying to understand the scope of how many women you know personally who have gone through something like that. It will be an uncomfortable conversation. And, yes, you’re right - maybe save that question only for women you REALLY know well. But if you don’t even believe that many women on FB have experienced these things, then you, sadly, are part of the problem. As women, we have all at some point in our lives experienced not being believed or listened to. That is specifically why some women don’t/won’t discuss it/come forward for YEARS. Some won’t ever talk about it. Every woman I have EVER met has experienced sexual harassment at the least. A staggering number of women I have ever met have experienced worse. It doesn’t matter what a woman looks like, her education, her economic status, her… anything. I have yet to meet a single woman who hasn’t experienced a moment of concern for her safety at some point in her life.
Him: I can’t even imagine.
Me: You’ve never had to.
Him: Well, men get harassed too.
Me [Oh for fuck’s sake. heeeere we go ]: And this is where we end the conversation because… No shit. No one is saying that. While it’s equally wrong, and should also be stopped, it happens in far less frequency than it happens to women. Hell, you don’t even need to know how to properly hold your keys.

Still Me: I’ve given you all the education I can stomach for now. Go educate yourself and get back to me. Go talk to your mom, your sister, your wife. Get back to me.

Men have enjoyed – and I use that word literally – a position of power over women for well over two thousand years now. While this statement doesn’t apply to every society on the face of the planet that ever was or exists now, it applies to enough societies to demonstrate the Patriarchy is real, that so many men have benefited from it and continue to do so (particularly religious zealots) that anyone who denies it is utterly clueless, like the man in the conversation above. The Patriarchy, as a societal concept, has even swept into U.S. government offices a score of men hellbent on controlling women, from denying them key elements of healthcare coverage especially as it relates to reproduction to ad hominin attacks against women like Senator Kamala Harris as being ‘hysterical’ when questioning a Trump cabinet appointee (men are never spoken of like this, not even Al Franken who clearly hates almost every Republicans) to ways of talking about women in a demeaning manner which has no bearing whatsoever on whether a man should be U.S. president or not. The whole point of the #metoo hashtag was to bring attention to this fact, that virtually every woman a man knows has experienced at least some sexual harassment, and that these same men – in being oblivious to it – are complicit to it. And this made me think; have I ever sexually harassed a women or treated a women as less than human because they were a woman?

The answer is, I don’t think so, at least not intentionally. I may have catcalled a woman in my youth, I’m not sure. If I did, I was wrong. Have I ever objectified a woman? Yes, and hopefully she was okay being objectified as I assume most Playboy centerfolds hopefully have. What I’ve certainly never done is badger a woman to date me or kowtow to my sexual advances. (Frankly, whenever a woman said ‘no’ from the start, I never pursued it further; I guess I’m either missing the ‘asshole’ gene or understand that a woman who isn’t interested at the moment isn’t likely to be interested later and I don’t have any right to assert my personal agenda on them – which I guess is what an asshole does.) I’ve certainly never approved of any legislation telling women what they can do with their bodies, and definitely not after what I may have done to their body, if you catch my drift. Jesus, can you imagine men being denied access to erectile dysfunction medicine? How fast do you think Congress would act? Faster than they would on gun control after 59 people were murdered and hundreds were injured in a mass shooting, that’s for sure.

Men, again like the one in the conversation above, have had the luxury of ignoring the problem because they are typically not the victim. Most men are so blind to the problem they don’t even think any form of sexual harassment has happened to any women they know. Well, men, imagine another man viewing and treating your mother, wife, sister or daughter as being less than human simply because they lack male genitalia, because that’s exactly what’s happening. Human beings love to exert power over each other and the Patriarchy makes it so easy for men. Why shouldn’t men be oblivious to the plight of women when they benefit so greatly from it? Because that’s what monsters do. Wait, what? Don’t like being characterized as something less than human, guys? Interesting.

To be clear, the power men have over women is not based on respect, it is based on fear. Power based on fear takes no mental effort. It takes no improvement of the self. It is weak power. This kind of power is not long-lasting; the oppressed will almost certainly seek a way out of their predicament if they are able. But to be respected – that lasts a long time. A gun in the face only lasts as long as the gun – or Bible or Koran or whatever – is around.

Certainly, there are women who do not mind being oppressed (maybe not raped, but repressed, sure). These are people who share a very human trait to not think too hard, to want to get by without having to do too much in life, who are content to let the whims of fate control them presumably because being the master of your own destiny takes effort. Far be it from me to insist any slave rise up and rebel, but it takes a certain simplemindedness not to see how accepting the role laid out for you by other people reinforces the system that enslaved them in the first place. Oh well, let the men deal with it; everything seems fine after all. Yes, a woman – if that’s their thing – is free to pursue this avenue of thinking. But they are not free to foist it on others and that is what their complicity in the Patriarchy is doing.

If it isn’t clear yet, it goes like this: Women do not exist for the sexual gratification of men*; they are not toys. They do not exist solely to bear men children; they are not property. They are conscious living beings who have rich experiences just like men. To say anything to the contrary begs for the man to justify his righteousness and SORRY, a book of mythical spouting isn’t going to cut it. ‘Cause if that’s the excuse, I’m sure I can find some sacred scripture that allows me to violate another man with a plunger and be totally justified.

[*Scores of men love to use women for this. I gather, though, that they do not like it when a women uses them for pleasure – men generally hate the idea of a woman having pleasure on their own terms – and then moves along. I’ve been there but there was the fact that the woman and I had an understanding before our ‘involvement.’ That aside, it’s also fun to imagine here what a world in which men forced themselves on each other and then claimed the victim was asking for it would look like. Okay, maybe not, but that’s the world women live in.]

It’s time for men to take responsibility for the power they wield. It is less then human to treat women as less than human. There’s no more being oblivious to what women deal with on a daily basis, not in the Information Age. Men need to start treating sexism as terrorism; if you see something, say something. You can’t take a backseat to this anymore. Own what is happening, what HAS been happening – that’s what a real man does. If you can’t handle the responsibility, well, what are you, a girl?

Me? I personally do not care about anyone’s gender or gender identity as it relates to daily life. I don’t care about anyone’s skin color. When it comes to people, all I care about are two things: That they are not an asshole and if a job is place in front of them, can they get the job done. I hesitate to call myself a Feminist not because I’m for the equal treatment of women but because I’m a human being with no special status in the cosmos* – in other words, mostly like everyone else – and this makes me understand that everyone deserves a fair chance. We, as humans, all on equal footing, should be lifting each other up, not preying on each other. Preying on each other – not some imaginary breakdown in a subjective, divine moral code – is to blame for the world such as it is. So enough already. Enough.

[* Don’t even think it, guys. Your god does not favor you. It’s a lie you tell yourselves to justify your actions.]

How the 2nd Amendment’s ‘Militia’ Argument Fails

On October 1, 2017, a gunman (name withheld for fear of glorifying a villain*) opened fire from his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay on a concert in Las Vegas, killing at least 58 people and injuring hundreds more. Upon storming the room, authorities found the gunman had killed himself and left a cache of automatic and other weapons and ammunition in his wake. Little is known about the gunman other than he was local to the area and had a fondness for guns and gambling. As of this writing there is no known motive. Predictably, gun control advocates are frothing at the mouth while fake news about the gunman’s motives is directed at both ends of America’s political spectrum. None of this matters; it is already mostly forgotten in just one week.

[* He was a white male, though.]

There was, without hesitation, conversation about enacting gun control. (Okay, more like there was knee-jerk reaction by some to cry foul and plead for gun control measures while gun enthusiasts clenched their arms wide-eyed and white-knuckled.) Now, whenever gun right advocates fear regulation – any regulation – they inevitably invoke their 2^nd Amendment right which states, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The central tactic of gun rights advocates is to argue that in order to prevent a tyrannical government from imprisoning its citizenry or otherwise running roughshod over their lives, the public must be properly prepared to resist armed government assault. While I do not oppose the 2^nd Amendment’s basic principle, gun rights advocates wish to invoke the amendment to oppose any regulations of the arms they claim they have a right to bear. The argument is fallacious on several accounts.

First, and so obvious it is always overlooked, is the fact that there are already regulations regarding weapons. By this I mean although I am fearful of the current U.S. government invading my life and creating laws that limit my freedom (if not throw me in jail outright for being an atheist), I cannot own the weapons necessary to actually oppose the government if its jackbooted thugs come gunning for me. I cannot own nuclear weapons. I cannot own a fully functional tank. I cannot own an anti-aircraft missile launcher. Why not? Would these things not be useful in guaranteeing my freedom from a tyrannical government? Naturally, the counter argument here is to claim the things I am talking about are weapons of mass destruction and personal firearms are not that. As we saw with the Las Vegas shooting, personal firearms can indeed be weapons of mass destruction. Even if ‘bump stocks’ were banned – well, they are but are still easy to get – wouldn’t personal firearms in the hands of many people constitute a weapon of mass destruction? Coincidentally, just prior to the Las Vegas shooting, a bill was headed to the floor of Congress that would ease the sale of silencers to the public. UH, WHAT DOES JOHN Q. PUBLIC NEED WITH A SILENCER? The answer is nothing; the bill is sponsored by the gun lobby (shocker) that values money over lives. Imagine the Las Vegas shooter had used silencers – he could have and thank goodness he didn’t – think of how many more people he would have killed before people knew what was going on and where he was shooting from. (Certainly, silencers don’t silence a weapon, but it sure suppresses the sound.) Remember that American citizens are constitutionally guaranteed the right to free speech but that this right is not without limits, nor should it be. However, gun enthusiasts never acknowledge this basic fact, probably because they’d lose a whole lot of ground in their argument by conceding it.

Second, think of how a government attempting an armed takeover of the lives of its citizens would actually go. Well, it wouldn’t. The U.S. government doesn’t possess the manpower to intern the entire country to say nothing of the volunteer army that would side with their own families in such a conflict. Even if the government went after people one by one, there are so many guns available in the country that all citizens would be armed before too long. What’s that, but the government has bombers and tanks and nuclear weapons? In that case, please reference the previous paragraph. It seems to have escaped the notice of the vast number of Americans that the U.S. government has zero interest in an armed conflict with its own citizens in order to control them because, well, the citizenry is already under control. Is anyone at this point still denying the tremendous amount of influence corporations and other organizations have with the U.S. government? How do you think the silencer almost got to the floor of Congress to begin with? The bill will still get there; Congress just has to wait until the next iPhone release and no one is looking. Even if we forgot the lobbyists, companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to name just three of many, are data mining people to learn how best to get them to buy their products. They also want you to update their software constantly so that you waste huge amounts of your free time trying to undo the havoc each update causes. Meanwhile, Facebook’s AI’s main purpose is to learn what your preferences are and keep shoveling your own shit down your throat. Meanwhile, the U.S. – nay, world – food supply is largely run by just ten companies. And let us not forget the banks which are happy to tell you that you can’t borrow money because your value as a human being is tied to your credit score. Strangely enough, I don’t see anyone taking up arms against any of these corporations or organizations that control their lives far more than the U.S. government ever will.

Now, given these criticisms, gun rights advocates will claim they need their guns to protect themselves from criminals. Problem is, it is QUITE clear given the wording of the 2^nd Amendment that this is not why there is a right to bear arms. Statistical data, now at least three years old, shows that the “more guns, less crime” mantra of gun owners is utter bullshit. Gun owners are also FAR more likely to shoot themselves – whether accidentally or in the act of suicide – than to use a gun against a criminal. Here, we might add that no one owning and/or concealing a gun at the Las Vegas concert could have stopped the gunman, so that right there defeats this argument for gun ownership. Fortunately, government controlled police had the tools and weapons necessary to address the situation and no one complained. Please insert ‘confused’ emoji here.

Finally, let’s stop pretending that the Founding Fathers (FF), who ratified the 2^nd Amendment is 1791, are gods who knew everything and didn’t make mistakes. We’re talking about many of the same people who wrote that “all men are created equal” yet owned slaves. There is simply no way the FF could have foreseen the circumstances its citizens currently endure. There is no one, and I mean no one who knows what life in the U.S. will be like over two hundred years from now. We can’t fully expect laws we make today to remain relevant that far into the future. So let’s stop treating the U.S. Constitution as if a gentle breeze blew it off God’s desk the very second He dotted the last ‘i.’ Had the FF foreseen current circumstances, I like to believe they would have been more clear about the 2^nd Amendment. But, if God couldn’t be clearer about ‘thou shalt not murder,’ why should we expect clarity from bureaucrats? Seeing how we cannot, maybe we need to come to our own conclusions that are relevant to life in America today.

Should there be a right to bear arms? In principle the answer is now maybe. Or, yes, if only to make the owner feel safer; we can’t have snowflakes worrying about sharing the street with a black man, after all. The reality is that America does need its gun because in the words of comedian Jim Jefferies, “There is one argument and one argument alone for having guns, and this is the argument: ‘Fuck off. I like guns.’” And that’s okay; we can like guns. And, maybe, we can have guns. But also maybe not before America gets a grip on its criminally insane mental problem.